Arts & Culture | Film

It’s entirely appropriate that Joann Sfar’s first two feature films, “Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life” (which opens on Aug. 31) and “The Rabbi’s Cat” are all or partly animated.

Judging by his demeanor in a Midtown hotel last week, Sfar is very animated himself. From the moment he enters the room, he is bubbling with good humor and bonhomie, engaging with a photographer (“You have to make me look handsome, you know”), and just plain happy to be present.

This year’s Latinbeat Film Festival is a vivid reminder that Jewish filmmakers have been at the heart of the New Argentine Cinema for all of its roughly two decades of existence. Among the five new Argentine films playing the event, which opens on Aug. 10, are “Querida Voy a Comprar Cigarillos y Vuelvo,” directed by Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat, and “No Return,” directed by Miguel Cohan. You can add their names to a roster of festival veterans that already includes Martin Rejtman, Daniel Burman and Diego Lerman, among others.

The film critic and historian Andrew Sarris is fond of saying that sometimes the most cinematic choice in the world is just to show two people in a room talking. When it comes to nonfiction film, despite the derisive phrase “talking heads documentary,” if the subject is interesting enough and the people talking are compelling, Sarris is absolutely right.

Early in Tomer Heymann’s new documentary, “The Queen Has No Crown,” the director’s twin brother, Erez, stares directly into the camera and says in a low, cold voice: “You’re extinction, that’s what you are. … Biologically, you’re useless.”

The outsider’s perspective is generally a fresh one, especially if the outsider in question is a great artist. That certainly is the case with two excellent new documentaries that will have their U.S. theatrical premieres at Film Forum in the coming weeks. The translator Svetlana Geier and the painter Anselm Kiefer have unique, unusual viewpoints on the bloody 20th century, and in “The Woman With Five Elephants” and “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” those viewpoints are given particularly cogent visual expression.

Three years ago, when Justin Lerner decided to give his friend, Evan Sneider, an actor with Down syndrome, a small role in his master’s thesis film, he did not know Sneider would eventually become critical to the launch of his own career.